Читать книгу History of Embalming - Gannal Jean-Nicolas - Страница 3

I had terminated my first researches upon the preservation of animal matters, and proposed to publish them; my notes were collated and my work prepared, when the idea struck me that in place of confining myself to the exposition of the results which I had obtained, I might, with advantage to science, present a history of the art of embalming from the highest antiquity to our time, and compare my processes, with those in use for the preservation of objects of normal anatomy, pathological anatomy, and natural history.

This determination has decided me to publish a volume, in place of a pamphlet of fifty pages.

I had no model to follow, for no author had re-united in the same book, the elements of which I wished this might be composed. I found myself, therefore, necessitated to collect together in the following pages the materials scattered throughout numerous works.

For embalming, Plutarch, Herodotus, Diodorus Sicculus, Stacy, Pliny, Cicero, Porphyrus, Prosper Alpin, Cassien, Clauderus, Penicher, Baricel, Rodiginus, Corippus, Gryphius, Crollius, the Reverend Fathers Kircher and Ménestrier, De Maillet, Volney, Rouelle, the Count de Caylus, MM. Pariset, Rouyer, Bory de Saint Vincent, and numerous other authors, have furnished me with descriptions and materials, which I was obliged to put in order and bring before the eye of the reader, in order to present to him a useful lecture, and in some sort preparatory to my own ideas. As my point of departure was scientific data, opinions and facts have come in place as the recital needed them; and thanks to this idea, which has never abandoned me, the numerous materials from which, in the commencement, I feared disorder and confusion, have come, as if by consent to dispose themselves in order; so great is the influence of a general idea in the arrangement of facts. I believe that I have reduced to exact proportions the art of embalming among different nations. My predecessors had referred too little to nature, too much to man, in the appreciation of Egyptian embalming; they had not sufficiently estimated the difficulties of the same practice among nations less favoured by climate. Facts reconsidered and interrogated with the aid of lights afforded by the recent progress of physics and chemistry, have furnished us with consequences naturally resulting from their attentive examination.

When the history of an art is followed step by step, as we have done for that of embalming, one is astonished at a psychological fact, equally applicable to every case – we see how idle and common place the human mind is, and how little prone it is to spontaneous activity. The gross and inconsiderate imitation of the Egyptian processes during a long series of ages, is one of the most remarkable examples of this disposition.

Trials directed by a spirit of analysis and critical examination have enabled me to substitute for complex operations, for long difficult and expensive operations, most frequently inefficacious, a simple means, of a determined action, and submitted for several years to the examination of committees appointed by the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medicine.

In order to trace the history of the preservation of objects of anatomy and natural history I have had no occasion to go back to an epoch distant from our own; for this science is altogether new. Beyond the discoveries of Chaussier, on the preservative properties of the deuto-chloride of mercury, the labours of MM. Dumèril, Cloquet and Breschet, there is very little existing on this subject. So that I have concluded, after a complete exposition of the preservative means given by these authors, it only remained for me to propose the preservative substances which, after numerous experiments, have appeared to me preferable to those which they have recommended. They possess a peculiar merit for the formation of cabinets of natural history, that of reducing the expense to at least one-nineteenth.

I have considered it my duty to give here the details of the composition of the liquids employed, either as baths or injections, by the physician and naturalist; the interest of science imposing on me this obligation. But, as regards embalming, the same motive does not exist; I have consequently abstained from giving in totality the means employed in this operation, reserving to myself the care of this process on the request of families or physicians.1

It was not until after many unsuccessful efforts that I succeeded in discovering a method capable of insuring the indefinite preservation of bodies deposited in the earth. A thousand unexpected difficulties arose in my path; and to cite only one, at the end of eight or nine months of preservation, a vegetable production, known to botanists under the name of byssus, for a long time embarrassed me; I tried numerous means, before discovering one capable of suppressing this formation.

The perfection to which I have brought the art of embalming, leaves little to desire. So convinced am I at length of the efficacy of the processes which I employ, that I shall be always ready, at the request of the authorities or of families, to exhume those bodies which I have already embalmed in great numbers, at any expressed period of time.